Vanity Fair Feb-14

1 Toni Bentley Author Toni Bentley is perhaps most famous for The Surrender, her memoir of obsessive love and sodomy. For this month’s issue, she contributed “The Thin End of the Whip” (page 108), on dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet and the woman who pledged her life to the 83-year-old mistress. “I came away thinking, These are the most civilized women I’ve ever met,” recalls Bentley. “There’s clearly more to the whip than meets the eye.” A stage adaptation of The Surrender opens this month in New York. 2 Buzz Bissinger Scores of hours of reporting, two weeks in Oklahoma, and one local barber were required to expose the full tragedy of student Christopher Lane’s senseless death and the three teens charged with killing him. “We as a country have to take…

With a six-foot-five-inch liberal mayor and The Tonight Show being broadcast out of Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York will be experiencing something of a 1960s moment this spring. After two decades of conservative, developer-friendly leadership in City Hall, the incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, will, for many New Yorkers, mark a welcome return to Lindsay-era progressive leadership. And with Jimmy Fallon moving The Tonight Show from Los Angeles back to New York, the program will be returning to its Carson-era roots—and, by extension, to the roots of late-night television. Steve Allen, the first host, headlined the show in New York from 1954 to 1957. He was a comedian best known for his funny phone calls as well as his quick comebacks: Do they get your program in…

Novels about war-ravaged Africa have long been the province chiefly of male writers. Now Susan Minot brings us Thirty Girls (Knopf), a haunting portrayal of two women: Esther, an abducted teen turned child soldier, and Jane, the privileged white American journalist on a mission to capture the voices of these children. Bobbed, liquored up, and looking for danger, Flappers (Sarah Crichton) were both glamorized and demonized by 1920s society. Judith Mackrell toasts six of the era’s most extraordinary rebel girls. Here’s a touchy subject: Why are some cultural groups in America—such as the Mormons, Cubans, Indians, and Chinese—succeeding and amassing wealth while others (we know who we are) are not? Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld argue that certain traits—a sense of superiority, inferiority, and impulse control—make up The Triple Package…

Keri Russell is as preposterously all-American as she looks. Raised out West, the ex-Mouseketeer and Golden Globe–winning sweetheart of J. J. Abrams’s early-aughts, cult-favorite soap, Felicity, is today a mom who reads food blogs and makes sea-salt caramels for her kids. It’s precisely that freshness that gives edge to her Nadezhda, cover name Elizabeth Jennings—a ruthless and hard-boiled K.G.B. double agent on FX’s The Americans, set in Reaganera D.C. (It is the brainchild of former C.I.A. officer Joe Weisberg, brother of Slate’s Jacob.) Earning two Emmy nominations after its first season—the second debuts next month—the drama drew raves for its complex portrait of a sham marriage, posing the eternal question: When two agents are “spouses,” can they remain emotionally unentangled? Offscreen, Russell is a sunny, self-effacing goof who finds the…

Picture the scene. It’s Saturday afternoon in the Middleton household. The atmosphere is heavy with expectation. All eyes are on the television, and occasionally the tension is broken with excited shouts of “Pass the ball!” or “Tackle him now!” It’s my grandmother, the leader of the Middleton pack, and we’re watching England play Ireland in the 1996 Five Nations Rugby tournament, a moment that will remain indelibly in my mind. Granny was incredibly, ferociously competitive—a gene which we have all inherited—and we would always worry she’d injure herself by getting overexcited. She was in her mid-80s at the time, but that didn’t stop her from having a crush on Jeremy Guscott, England’s heartthrob player of the 1990s. Rugby was a big thing for our family, and the focal point was…

A peacock pranced on the roof of Amshenski Dvor, a restaurant outside the town of Sochi, on Russia’s Black Sea coast. A couple of friends, Yaraslau Zauharodni and Konstantsiya Leschenko, had joined me for a dinner of grilled meat and sweet Caucasian wine. Yaraslau is the chief of the hockey competition for the Winter Olympics. Konstantsiya works for the Olympics, too, in information technology. I had met them both in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, a few years before. Stagnant Belarus is not a place of upward mobility. My friends had new energy now, working for the Olympics. I had to confess a feeling of unease about what may lie in store for Sochi when the Winter Olympics begin, in February. The traffic may be terrible. The power may fail,…